DESCRIPTION: (Applicant's Description) Pediatric oncology patients, their parents, and their health care providers face multiple decisions during the course of treatment. The decisions differ in size, nature, impact and consequences but individually and collectively, they largely determine the treatment experience and its outcome. An understanding of the decision making process experienced by patients, parents, and providers plus the factors each considers important in decision making will promote understanding and help providers to better assist patients, families, and each other with difficult decisions. Decision making research in adult oncology populations is more developed than that in pediatric oncology; descriptive and experimental studies have contributed to the development of clinical guidelines for use in decision making. Researchers working with adult populations can advance the developing decision making research in pediatric oncology by sharing methodological and field experiences as well as ways to interpret and apply findings. The overall intent of this workshop is to foster an exchange and critique of ideas and ongoing research in decision making such that areas of consensus, disagreement, and needed future study can be specified. There are five objectives for this workshop. The workshop will bring together a leading nurse researcher in the area of adult decision making, pediatric oncology nurse researchers who are currently conducting decision making studies, members of a newly formed international network of pediatric oncology nurse researchers whose first study is on decision making, and nurse representatives from the two pediatric oncology cooperative groups, POG and CCG, who are initiating plans for an intergroup study on decision making. The expected outcomes are a set of publishable papers on consensus, disagreement, and priority areas for future study, and the identification of a cadre of researchers to pursue decision making research in pediatric oncology.